Mac OS X Virus...Not
Category: Apple/Mac OS...
Posted Thursday, February 16, 2006 at 04:52 PM [GMT-6]

Apparently tiring of the Cheney-as-shooter story, the "Media" is now hopping all over reports of a "virus" that affects <gasp> Macs running OS X. And, as usual, the reports of Apple's vulnerabilities are greatly exaggerated.

Oh, I suppose you could call this a worm or a trojan horse, but, really, the same description might well apply to any bit of malware that a user has to go to the trouble of installing, configuring and executing. It's much more likely that folks are going to do harm to their systems or their data by inadvertently dragging a file into the trash and emptying it.

And, as the folks over at Ambrosia Software are quick to point out, "It does not exploit any security holes; rather it uses "social engineering" to get the user to launch it on their system." This alludes to the use of Apple's iChat software to transmit the offending program, which shows up as a file named "latestpics.tgz."

Given the steps the user of the potentially-infected computer has to go through to actually activate this poorly written piece of code, this observation by one of the commenters on the linked thread seems appropriate: "This seems a bit more like an IQ test than a proper worm..."

Technorati tags: Mac OS Trojan | Oompa Loompa Worm | Apple